Wilde Lake(42)

PART TWO





INTEMPERANCE


On a snowy evening just before Valentine’s Day 1978—I was sitting at the coffee table, dutifully addressing twenty-seven cards to my classmates, knowing I would return home with only four or five cards from the other kids like me, kids whose parents insisted on an all-or-nothing policy—my father arrived home at five o’clock. That was unusual enough. We were lucky to see him at six thirty most evenings, and dinner was often as late as seven. (Teensy grumbled about this a lot, under her breath. “Lincoln freed the slaves, I thought.”) Far stranger, our father walked straight to the little butler’s bar in our living room and poured himself a half glass of whiskey. He then asked me to leave the living room, as he needed to be on the phone. I didn’t dare remind him he had a phone in his room.

I asked Teensy if she knew what was going on.

“Mind your own business,” she said, as she improvised in the kitchen, trying to make a dinner that would lift my father’s spirits, but it was Thursday and she shopped on Friday. AJ was out, as always. He had basketball practice most afternoons, then rehearsals—school plays, choir, madrigals—in the evenings. He had tried to persuade our father that he should be given a car for his sixteenth birthday in April, but our father was firm that he could not afford such an extravagance, even with the Straight-A-Student discount offered by auto insurers at the time. AJ had to count on Bash or Ariel, who had early winter birthdays and more generous parents. Bash had a very sharp, bright red Jeep because his family lived so far out. AJ hitchhiked, too, sometimes, another one of his secrets that I banked. I think he hitchhiked home that very night. His shoes squeaked and there were drops of water clinging to his hair when he finally arrived home.

AJ didn’t ask our father any questions about his taciturn gloominess. Instead, he did all he could to distract him from his funk, telling stories about practice—Bash had been trying to impress a cheerleader and ran straight into a wall, Davey shot free throws in the way girls are taught, dropping the ball between his legs and arcing it underhand. He had made five baskets in a row that way, AJ said, on a bet. Stories like that, harmless and aimless.

Our father smiled absently, picked at the pork chops that Teensy had tried to defrost in cool water, not entirely successfully. (I’m not sure if most people had microwaves at the time, but I know we didn’t. Didn’t and still don’t. My father loathes them. It’s a principle with him, not having a microwave. He says time is not meant to be manipulated that way.) At one point, he almost poured ketchup on his salad, but my warning came just in time. It was odd enough that we even had bottled dressing on the table. On a typical night, my father’s salads were an evening ritual, that kind of eccentric family thing that makes a kid proud and embarrassed at the same time. He rolled up his shirtsleeves and dressed the salad at the table in a battered wooden bowl, pouring oil and vinegar, squeezing a lemon wedge. The bowl and the glass cruets were his only family heirlooms, along with the planter’s desk in his bedroom. When his grandfather died in the early 1970s, my father had driven down to Virginia and returned with these items, nothing more. He called his salad bowl and cruets his “lares and penates.” For years, I thought that was Latin for oil and vinegar.

“What’s up?” I asked AJ in a hoarse whisper as we cleaned up. Teensy always left as soon as dinner was on the table, and it fell to us to tidy the kitchen each night. True, this was little more than rinsing things for the dishwasher and putting away leftovers. But given AJ’s busy life, I did this alone more often than not and I bridled at the unfairness of it all. There was so much unfairness in life, especially when one was the youngest, and a girl. I planned to change that one day. I was going to be an astronaut or a president, maybe an astronaut and then the president. And here we are, more than thirty-five years later, and we have plenty of female astronauts and we’re within spitting distance of a female president. But you know what I consider true progress? The fact that we had a female astronaut disturbed enough to make that famous cross-country trip in adult diapers, intent on killing a romantic rival. When your kind is allowed to be mediocre or crazy—that’s true equality.

“There’s been an appeal,” AJ said. “That man who killed Sheila Compson. He’s filed an appeal.”

“What do you mean?”

“He says the state withheld information about a key witness, someone who can confirm that he dropped her off alive, just as he testified, and that her shoes were in a rucksack. Dad said something—intemperate to a television reporter.”

“Something cold?”

“Not temperature. Intemperate.” AJ, still doing PSAT prep, wedged a lot of big words into his sentences for practice. “He lost his temper. And you know he never gets angry, he prides himself on that. But the TV reporters got to him before he heard and he was caught off guard.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, he said”—AJ looked around, lowered his voice anyway—“he said ‘That son of a bitch is lucky he’s not on death row.’”

I know, it sounds quaint now. Son of a bitch. Small children probably say it for laughs on cable channels. But it mattered at the time. So many things mattered that don’t anymore. Remember, Ed Muskie’s presidential hopes had been torpedoed by tears only a few years earlier. “Son of a bitch” at least had the advantage of being masculine, but it was not something a future attorney general or congressman or senator should say. Intemperate, as AJ characterized it. Our father had been intemperate.